


Honeysuckle and Silence

by disasterhawke



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Broken Watcher, Canon Compliant, Consent, Deadfire, Demisexual Watcher, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Intimacy, Non-Sexual Intimacy, One Shot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ranger Watcher, Sad and Happy, Xoti is Perfect, pale elf watcher, shameless fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:34:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25945165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disasterhawke/pseuds/disasterhawke
Summary: As her ship sails towards Ukaizo, the Watcher finds herself as she has always been - alone with the fact that she cannot ever truly be alone.Except that she's somehow surrounded herself with people who love her. People who care for her. People who notice when, the night before the most monumental day of her life, Harper isn't sleeping.And one person, most of all, who wants to silence the bell that rings in her head.
Relationships: Aloth Corfiser & The Watcher, Edér Teylecg & The Watcher, Serafen & The Watcher (Pillars of Eternity), The Watcher/Xoti (Pillars of Eternity)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Honeysuckle and Silence

**Author's Note:**

> When Deadfire came out what seems like a very long time ago, now, I expected to run straight into Aloth's arms. And, to be honest, I did - because Aloth and Edér have held my own heart since the first game. But very quickly, and just as undeniably, a certain Dawnstar wormed her way into my heart.
> 
> Here's to the people who never give up, who never stop being patient, no matter how long it takes.

The first time Berath’s bells had rung in her head, they’d sounded so loudly that Harper thought she’d never stop hearing them ring. That first time, though, they had flickered and faded as soon as she’d stepped back out of the Beyond.

Now they won’t stop ringing.

It’s not a sound that’s whole and complete. It’s this distant, tinny vibration that won’t get out of her head. It’s been there since they stood in the heat of Magran’s embrace, and with every hour they’ve sailed closer to Ukaizo, the ringing has gotten sharper. More piercing. At one point, she’d put her hand to her ear and found her fingertips bleeding.

The Defiant is sailing at the front of the formation, so here - on the bow of the ship - she can see nothing but the waves. When they’d first set out on a ship, what seems like years ago, Harper had found it comforting. She’d loved the feeling of being tossed about on the water - loved the unending horizon - loved the sense that there was so much  _ more  _ out there. Things that were real, and complicated, and distracting, and relentlessly, beautifully  _ mortal. _

You’d think she’d be used to having other voices seeping their way into her mind, but that side of being a Watcher has never fully settled. But she can’t do anything about it, so Harper has learned - slowly, and with a lot of pain, and with the help of friends she’s not sure she deserves - to live with it. When it’s worst, she sits down with her bow and polish and tends the supple wood. She fletches. At times, she’s taken every torn bit of clothing the crew had to offer and sewn it anew.

None of this is working, anymore. Even Pride’s mane tickling her skin, the warm rumble of the lion’s slumbering breathing, the sense of being safe and protected that he’s always given her - even that isn’t enough.

Because what they’re sailing towards is even more incomprehensible than the time she remembered Thaos. More impossible than the time she found out what the Gods really were. Harper has a fleet of ships at her back and hundreds of people depending on her and  _ all of the souls in all of the world _ and it’s too much to fit in her mind.

The bell keeps ringing, ringing, ringing to remind her of what she can’t possibly manage.

Then; fingertips.

Soft, gentle, curling over her shoulder and holding her steady. Harper knows the touch at once, not by the feeling - Xoti could hold her in a grip tight enough to crush her bones if she wanted to - but by the smell.

Watchers sense things in all sorts of different ways, Kana had told her once. There were some who saw the spirits around them as lights, others as colours, some as sounds. Some Ciphers, Serafen has told her, had the same instincts. But Harper had always sensed things by smell, and Xoti - Xoti has always smelt of honeysuckle. Rich and heady and overpowering. With her around, it’s even possible to ignore the stench of Serafen’s decidedly relaxed hygiene policies.

“Hey, Watcher,” Xoti says, kneeling down beside her. 

Harper’s voice comes out small, sundered, though there’s no wind to tear it away. “Hey, Xoti.”

“You keep starin’ out at the water like that, you’ll be fixin’ to get yourself seasick.”

“I’m not sure it works like that.”

“Well,” Xoti replies, reaching up and brushing a stray lock of hair back behind Harper’s pointed ear, “Better safe than sorry. I, ah -”

Something’s wrong. Harper tilts her head to the side and looks up, into Xoti’s dark eyes. The priestess stutters nearly every other sentence, these days, but when she starts it normally doesn’t stop. The absence of sound, of words tumbling relentlessly from her lips - it isn’t right. The silence sounds like the shattering of a thousand stars.

“What’s wrong?”

Xoti’s fingers close around the hand that Harper extends, her eyes fixing on them. “Me an’ the others, we’ve been talkin’ ‘bout - ‘bout you. An’ how you’re - sakes alive, Watcher, I feel like ah’ve drawn the shortest straw, here.”

Oh. It’s that. It’s the thing she does, because she’s a Watcher, because she’s not like them - where she scares them just by existing. It hurts. It hurts most because Xoti has always been the one who  _ hasn’t _ been like that. The one who’s always looked at her and seen a person. Even Edér, who’s barely left her side when she’s needed him - even her best friend in the entire world - even he sometimes looks at her like he’s not quite sure she’s real.

“You can tell me anything, Xoti,” Harper whispers, sighing. “I promise I don’t bite.”

“Ohh, well, Tekēhu, he told me that it ain’t right to do that unless you’re fixin’ to - anyway, that ain’t what ah’m here to - Watcher, when’s the last time you got any sleep?”

The question takes Harper by surprise, so much that she snaps her head up to look at Xoti’s round face, creased in concern. “What?”

“You know,” Xoti says, frown transforming into a grin, “that thing you’re meant to do, each night, when you go lay in your bed and get to dream about all sorts of things?”

Harper laughs, her fingers tightening around Xoti’s, but the question hurts as much as the hesitation that led up to it. Because dreams - real dreams, genuine dreams, the sort of dreams that make you wake up with a stupid grin on your face or with a ridiculous story to tell the next day - those dreams were lost to her a long time ago. She doesn’t get them, just like she doesn’t get silence, real silence, because bells replaced silence the day Eothas destroyed her home and memories replaced dreams the day she survived a Bîaŵac in the Gilded Vale.

“Yeah,” Xoti says, when the reply comes as a grimace on Harper’s face, “ah thought so.”

Shame trickles cold through Harper’s limbs. “So,” she says, tightly, “I guess now the whole crew’s having a conversation about how bad their captain is at functioning like a normal god-damned person.”

The words come out too hard; she sees Xoti wince, the moonlight making the edges of her face hard.

“Watcher…”

Harper sighs. “I’m sorry, Xoti.”

The priestess shifts, untangling her hand from Harper’s and holding out her arms. It isn’t the first time Xoti has offered to hug her, so it isn’t the first time that Harper notices that it’s an offer at all. She never offers with anyone else. Some people - like Maia and Serafen and Vela - she just doesn’t hug at all. Others - Aloth and Edér and Rekke - she hugs whether they like it or not.

But she’s always offered, with Harper.

Touching people used to be a normal thing. Her parents had hugged her when she was a child. She’d hugged her siblings. Her cousins. She’d held hands with her friends when they ran through the town. When she’d grown up to work for her aunt, she’d shaken hands with the customers who’d come in and accepted their claps on the shoulder when handing them goods.

Then, somewhere along the way - around the time that her dreams became a prison rather than an escape - she’d stopped letting it happen. Quietly, she’d let the people around her know that touching her was bad. That it wasn’t okay. Pallegina had tended her wounds without touching her, the glow of her magic an inch away from her body. No one had ever offered to help her up. The day they found out the Gods weren’t real, Aloth had placed his hand on her shoulder, and Edér had held her hand, and even that had felt like a monumental shift, never to be repeated.

Xoti...Xoti changed that. Because she’s always accepted the gentle shake of Harper’s head...then she’s always kept asking. Even though the answer has always been no.

But there’s a bell ringing so sharply in Harper’s mind that it makes her want to build a fortress around her soul, to try and block out even just the smallest bit of that tinny, neverending chime.

So Harper looks at Xoti’s open arms and she doesn’t shake her head. She just stares. A moment later, a cold breeze washes over them and chills the damp lines down her cheeks. She’s crying. Silently, the only kind of silence she has now, the tears coiling around her jaw before tumbling into her armour.

“Watcher?”

“Yeah?”

Neither of them has moved. Xoti is still knelt there in front of her, arms spread. Harper is still sat with her arms around her knees, the weight of Pride’s bulk curled against her back. It feels like the world is standing still, and that thought - that ridiculous, impossible thought - is so precious that Harper wants to hold it forever.

“You helped me through my nightmares,” Xoti says, her voice low, and her accent thick. “Let me help you through yours.”

Another blink, and more tears run down Harper’s cheeks.

There are other people watching. Harper can feel them, tiny spots of heat on her consciousness, lingering at the end of the tethers that connect her soul to every other soul on the ship - the tethers she can do so little with, no matter how much Serafen tries to teach her, but are there nonetheless. They know her. They watch her just as much as her title says she should them. Every little thing she does, whether they mean to or not, they scrutinise.

Damnit. She needs this. This moment of stillness. She wants it more than she’s ever wanted anything, so much that it scares her.

Harper shakes her head. But what she says is not  _ no. _ What she says is: “Not here.”

A smile as brilliant as a thousand stars lights up Xoti’s face. She drops one arm, and holds out the other, helping Harper to her feet. “See, I thought you’d say that. So...um...well, you’ll see! I hope it’s alright…”

“What,” Harper asks, taking Xoti’s hand and following her towards the stairs, “did you do?”

The answer comes the moment Xoti sheepishly pushes open the door to Harper’s cabin.

Somewhere, Eld Engrim is having a heart attack, because Xoti has filled the room with candles. To her credit, she’s been as safe as can be - each of them is in a mismatched open jar, the glass slightly frosted, leaving the room looking as if it’s been covered in lanterns of all shapes and sizes. When the ship rocks, the candles flicker too, making the shadows on the ceiling dance.

“...Xoti?”

“Oh! Oh, wait, hold on, ah forgot - would you mind turnin’ around, just a minute? Jus’ wait there - hold on - ah’m almost - there, you can look now.”

This time, when she turns, Harper steps up into the room and blinks. Because the ceiling - which is plain, and wooden, and has whorls that she’s counted each night she’s failed to sleep - has been replaced by the starlit sky. By velvet black overlaid with shimmering lights. They reflect where Xoti’s placed the lanterns, she realises - and this must be why Xoti put the lanterns even over the floor.

“It’s beautiful,” Harper whispers, as she steps further in, walking past Xoti entirely to stand amidst the twinkling lights.

Xoti closes the door, holding a hand to her flushed cheeks. “I’ll be sure to tell Aloth you said thank you, seein’ as he spent so long writin’ the scroll to make sure ah could - well, you know, ah get great powers from Gaun, but they’re more suited to blindin’ you in the light than makin’ it all beautiful.”

There’s a small spot in the very centre of the room with no lanterns. Harper stands there, staring up at the ceiling, and forgets the sound of bells.

When she turns round, Harper holds out her arms.

The wonderful thing about Xoti’s face is how expressive it is. The priestess had once told her that was why she wore the hood - because people had picked on her for her easily flushing cheeks and wild grin. But her hood is down, now, blown back by the wind up on the deck of the ship. Harper can see every inch of the astonishment and hope that illuminates her face.

She has always known Xoti is beautiful; she’s just never been able to hear it over the sound of bells. But Xoti steps into her arms and holds her gently, then tightly, as if the moment she touches Harper she realises how very real she is. The thing she’s always accepted even when no one else could. Eyes shut, Harper wraps her arms around Xoti’s waist and buries her face in her shoulder, breathing in honeysuckle and silence.

“You know,” Xoti mumbles softly into her ear, one hand cradling the back of her head. “Ah’m gonna have mighty trouble lettin’ you go, Watcher.”

And it might not matter tomorrow, it might all shatter into a million pieces once they step onto Ukaizo. Xoti’s God might scatter their souls to the winds of Rymrgand’s oblivion and this might be the last time she ever holds another living being, but Harper doesn’t think of that, can’t think of it, because the room is full of light and relentless, impossible hope.

“Xoti,” Harper says, pulling back. She presses a feather-light touch of her fingertips to the woman’s cheek, tracing the edges of her smile.

“Ah know, Watcher.”

“...you do?”

“See, you’ve never really needed me to work people out fer you, what with how good you already are at readin’ their minds. But ah can do it too. Same as you. Just as good. So you don’t have to tell me, if’n you aren’t ready to. You don’t have to do nothin’ that you don’t want. Ah can go, after this, if that’s what you’d like.”

Harper takes a deep breath, and pushes away the sound of Thaos’s voice. She pushes away the sound of Eothas’s titanic steps. She pushes away the screams of everyone who lived in Caed Nua. And with small, monumental movements, she presses her palm against Xoti’s cheek.

And whispers, “I don’t want you to go, Xoti.”

“Ah may’ve been plannin’ to sleep outside your door like ah usually do anyways, so ah’ll take gettin’ to be in a bed fer once. Ah mean, if that’s what you mean, that is, ah -”

“It’s what I mean,” Harper laughs, leaning her forehead against Xoti’s. “Please. Stay with me. I don’t know how much I can give you, but - please stay.”

Most of the time, Xoti’s voice is melodic and bright. When the weight of her lantern was worst, it had become small and quiet. When she responds this time, it takes on the sharpness it has when those around her have gotten themselves hurt again.

“Now see, you won’t be givin’ me anythin’ that you don’t wanna give, Watcher,” Xoti lectures, with a fierce shake of her head. “Cause ah don’t want nothin’ that you aren’t ready for. Not that ah’ve not thought about a thing or two, ‘specially with all the stories Serafen gets to tellin’...ehm, anyway.”

In the flickering candlelight, the blush on Xoti’s cheeks is so entrancing that Harper wants to press her lips to the skin there, to find out if it’s as soft as it seems. She isn’t ready for it. She might not be ready before the world ends, and there’s a sadness in that - but the moment the sadness comes the scent of honeysuckle envelops her again and washes it away.

They stay there for a long moment, wrapped in illusory starlight. It takes Harper longer than normal to realise what Xoti’s waiting for - permission.

Hesitantly, carefully, Harper begins to talk and they begin to move. There’s something monumental about taking armour off, not because of where it could lead, but because the world is too rough to spend a moment without it. They go slowly, but it still feels like every time another buckle comes undone, another lace is untied, that Xoti is tearing away the walls that keep Harper safe. Whenever she thinks that, Harper closes her eyes and focuses on the fact that she cannot hear the bells, the fact that even the minds that bustle around the ship have slipped from her awareness.

Xoti leads her into the bed that isn’t big enough for both of them and opens her arms again, waiting only just long enough for Harper to reach for her before pulling her in. She holds Harper tightly, lips pressed into her hair, their legs tangled, fingers making soothing circles over her shoulder blades.

And when they sleep, surrounded by twinkling lights, Harper dreams.

It isn’t a long dream. It isn’t complicated, or full of tremendous futures and hopes like they used to be, a long time ago. Nor does it contain any things that are so far from the truth as to lack comfort - Harper does not dream of home, in Aedyr, nor of Caed Nua at its finest, when she and Edér used to spend hours talking in the hedge maze.

No, what she dreams of is this: a wall, tall as the eye can see, enveloping her on all sides. Pale stone, like the white of her Glamfellen skin, but crumbling. Worn away not by time, not by winds or rain, but by the relentless and steady assault of a vibrant, climbing honeysuckle bush. Leaves as vivid as Caed Nua’s lawns; flowers as vivid pink as the sunset; branches thin and strong and neverending in their pursuit to tumble the stones, bit by bit. No matter how long it takes.

When Harper wakes, the sound of the bell rings in her head again. She opens her eyes and focuses, letting herself embrace a far warmer sound - one that makes the crumbling wall around her heart sing. The sound of Xoti’s gentle, rumbling snores.

Seven hours later, they step onto the shores of Ukaizo.

Harper tightens her grip on the bow in her left hand - and on Xoti’s fingers in her right. No matter what they do, the world will change forever.

But the world already changed the moment Harper opened her arms, and let someone else in. After that...well, nothing seems quite so monumental at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so very much for reading. <3


End file.
